1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computing systems and, more particularly, to techniques for analyzing a history of changes in a system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, organizations have become increasingly dependent upon the proper operation of both computer hardware and software. Many business organizations and governmental entities rely upon applications that access large amounts of data, often exceeding a terabyte or more of data, for mission-critical applications. Many of these applications require near-continuous access to data. For example, many systems such as retail processing databases, airline reservation databases, and financial institution databases must be available to perform transaction processing 24 hours a day. Downtime associated with such systems can be disastrous. Accordingly, maintaining the proper operation and availability of the system and its applications is critically important.
In addition to the above, some of the tasks of managing a computing system include that of server provisioning and restoring a system to a particular operating system and applications configuration or state. Because downtime in an organization can severely impact operations, the ability to deploy additional servers, replace failed servers, or restore a previous state as quickly as possible can be critical. Certain tools, such as VERITAS's multi-platform server-provisioning software OpForce®, may be used to facilitate rapid deployment of added servers, replacement of failed servers, or restoration of a previous configuration state. One of the services provided by the OpForce® product is the creation of a snapshot of a particular server installation. That snapshot may contain all of the server's information, including the operating system and its settings, and all of the installed applications and personalization information. By referencing and applying a previously created snapshot, a previous state may be restored or new hardware may be rapidly deployed and configured to replace a failed server. In addition, one or more snapshots for known good default configurations may be stored for rapid deployment of additional servers.
In view of the above, it is critical that the cause of an application failure or a system aberration be quickly identified and remedied. However, diagnosing the causes of such problems can be very difficult. Typically, a system administrator may be required to study logs to determine the past history and generally engage in a root cause analysis (RCA). However, as may be appreciated, such an approach may be very time consuming and relatively inefficient.
Accordingly, methods and mechanisms which facilitate such an analysis are desired.